It is said that "Necessity is the mother of invention" and if we really need something, there is always a creative person around to invent it.
I am in the fortunate position of being the Managing Director of a company with a dynamic range of technical abilities. This range of abilities became the mother of the invention I am going to tell you about.
The Necessity
In 2001 we were approached by a client in the Estate Agency sector needing to identify the person within his organisation responsible for running up considerable charges calling premium rate numbers (09 numbers). The client had many office locations each with their own internal telephone system so to find the culprit would need 'at that time' considerable investment in call management software being installed at each location. The cost of implementing the software would be false economy so the telephone abuser carried on running up the charges.
The challenge was set and a project was born...
The Invention
The difficulty in analysing telephone bills particularly for multi-site companies are the reams of paper which accompanies the invoice or at best case a compact disk containing data which requires loading into a stand alone client based PC.
Both are time consuming and inevitably lack the ability to give thorough insight into tariff charges, phone abuse and calling trends. An inexpensive solution had to be found to deal with these issues whilst also giving access to multiple users at any one time from any PC anywhere in the world.
By uniting the Telecommunications and I.T. departments on the project we developed within 6 months a fully functional call management system accomplishing every goal we had set out to achieve.
We named this system ‘Call Observer’ in recognition of exactly that.
Call Observer works on the principle of processing raw call data delivered through the PSTN Telephone Network and not the office telephone system which most traditional management systems tend to adopt. This negates the requirement for directly connecting expensive hardware and software to each telephone system. The interface to view and analyse the call traffic is held on a secure web server at PSU’s head office and all that is needed to view and analyse the call information is a web browser enabled PC.
Benefits at a glance:
- Easily identify telephone call abuse.
- Analyse detail in minutes instead of hours.
- One bill solution for unlimited amount
of office locations. - No paper.
- Highly detailed reports.
- Very fast.
- Web based.
- No special software required.
- Unlimited users.
- Easy to use.
- Extension level and departmental reports can be produced. Particularly useful in a telesales environment.
- Download raw itemised CSV files into spreadsheets containing date, times, number called from, number dialled, destination type, cost and in most cases the extension the call was made from.
- It’s free.
and in the end...
Going back to the original need for the invention, it was implemented across our client’s locations and immediately identified that it wasn’t down to one person but many were involved, downloading ringtones and calling adult content/joke lines.
It also identified other unnecessary non-business calls including a premium rate faxing scam which was going on at that time.
Once ‘Call Observer’ had become known to the staff it dramatically reduced unnecessary calls and improved productivity.
If you're not currently using this free service and would like more information, please call one of our sales team on (0870) 112 1128 or e mail info@psu.uk.com
